Show HN: Three Magic Words | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Three Magic Words

threemagicwords.app

204 pointsbeepy137 comments

Here’s a free, fun, novel five-letter word game for the web! It’s a game I originally wrote for the iPhone in 2010, but wasn’t able to finish before my first child was born. When I left my senior web developer job in September 2021 I figured I would postpone looking for work and finish the game before another 11 years passed, and expose myself to new skills doing it (in this case, Swift). I released it on the App Store in December, then turned my attention to doing a web version — when suddenly Wordle was in The NY Times, and then everywhere.

Perhaps foolishly, I plowed ahead and here we are. Like Wordle and some other NY Times word games, there is a single daily puzzle, but like traditional crossword puzzles, it gets harder throughout the week.

Open articleView on HN

Game Play: maybe you want it this way, but the animations are an impediment to gameplay. I like to type the words, and in a timed situation, typing quickly should be an asset to the player. The animations make good players worse, even on first guesses before you slow the animations. I like slowing the player after multiple bad guesses, but don't hamstring us from the start.

Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especially in the games you rate as more challenging, plurals render the game dull. There are plenty of interesting and difficult 5-letter patterns in English that make this type of game better.

Stars: this seems like an afterthought. I had done four or five of these puzzles before I realized what the mechanism for the stars was. Even when the summary screen showed that I finished with x number of stars, I really only cared about how quickly I was able to complete the puzzle. It is good that time is the overall measure in your game, but I found that I cared very little about stars in the end.

Overall a nice iteration on the Scrabble/Boggle/Wordle paradigm.

I like it too. Wrt. to the animations, why not pause the clock during the transitions?

Same feedback. Losing time with the animations while waiting - makes them less enjoyable to watch and more an annoyance you want to swipe away

This isn't a logic game, this is a game of "guess what word I'm thinking of".

    - - G G Y
    - E E - S
    - - - - Y
    
    O P U
    B F K L L

Possible solutions:

    b u G G Y
    p E E k S
    f o l l Y

    f o G G Y
    p E E k S
    b u l l Y

    f o G G Y
    p E E l S
    b u l k Y

I wrote down the solutions ahead of typing them in, in this order, and was extremely frustrated that the answers I came up with, which were correct, did not read your mind. Even more frustrating because when coming up with the solutions I discarded "PEELS" because it's just a four-letter-word with an S at the end, not a proper five-letter-word. It shouldn't have been a solution.

It ought to do a better job of explaining that there are specific words it's looking for. Originally I did explore the game you thought that this game was — create any 3 words using all the loose tiles — but the problem is, there are around 12K five-letter words in standard word game play. My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an acceptable word, only to have the remaining words technically legal, but not among the remaining guessable words, and worse, possibly offensive. If I limit it to only the guessable words, then for many people, words they reasonably expected to be accepted would be inexplicably rejected.

Requirements imo, should be 1) All used words are guessable 2) There are no possible alternate solutions with unguessable words

I haven't done the math, but I suspect there are plenty of solutions like this, you'll just have to calculate them.

It would probably make the difficulty guide inaccurate, unless you take the lowest possible difficulty as the guide where ever there is more than one solution.

> My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an acceptable word, only to have the remaining words technically legal, but not among the remaining guessable words, and worse, possibly offensive.

Given the restriction that you can only guess "words", you need to improve the wordlist anyway. I had "denty" rejected as a guess, which was not a good look when "folky" turned out to be an official answer.

My other suggestion would be to revise the keyboard input - it's much easier to type the entire word I want to guess than to look at which letters are missing and only type those.

And while it's not a suggestion, I would note that your "cruelly challenging" difficulty level is noticeably easier than the levels that are supposed to be below it, because it provides no clues. This makes it much easier to determine which letters go in which word.

>I discarded "PEELS" because it's just a four-letter-word with an S at the end, not a proper five-letter-word

Did you discard "PEEKS" on the same basis?

Good point, I missed that one.

I know that you're not copying the wordle vibe necessarily, but the animations seem too over the top to me. They're pushing into candy crush territory, and to me that a strong detractor. One of the thing I appreciate about wordle is that it isn't trying to be more than it is, and this feels too much like the free games that fill app stores and employs a bunch of dark patterns to hook your attention.

Seconding this. What's so refreshing about Wordle is just how respectful it is of the user's time and attention. Beyond the "one a day, and you're done" structure, Wordle's presentation is clean, snappy, and completely relevant to the task at hand.

I like Three Magic Words's gameplay, but yeah, the presentation left a very sour taste in my mouth. I just want to solve a puzzle and that's it. No need for superfluous animation or scoring.

One improvement would be for the animations to at least happen in parallel, having them sequential seems over the top. It's a few seconds of waiting for a new puzzle to finish all of its animations. It would be nicer if they all happened together in about 500ms.

The game seems to expect a particular solution even when there are multiple possibilities of forming correct words. For example, I tried "peeks" & "bully" but the game only accepted "peels" & "bulky". This is frustrating, as one has to "mind-read" the game.

Another thing to improve is to reduce the frequency of plural forms. Plurals are just a cop-out to turn four-letter words into five-letter words. ;)

I encountered _the exact same thing_. I immediately closed the game after that.

You realize that this is exactly how wordle works right?

In Worldle you need only guess one word. The player can do whatever they want to get there, but there is only one valid solution. Having two (or more) valid solutions to a game, but only accepting one of them, is unfortunately a recipe for frustration.

The equivalent would be if Worldle made you also guess each intermediate word to get to the solution.

Why does guessing a series of words change whether it's bad to have one solution?

Wordle starts out with thousands of valid solutions, right?

I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment

I hear you. I personally found the game less interesting before I added the "threat" of losing stars — it felt to me more like trial-and-error work. However, I think there is value in embracing its more meditative side and offering untimed (and I supposed, star-less) play as well.

The stars could stay if the timer is removed. You’d just lose them only if you get a red guess on them

The casual nature of Wordle is one of its biggest strengths. Don't underestimate the allure of the zen/meditative angle of the game. It's something to look forward to everyday because of it.

Definitely get rid of the timer or make it something you can turn on. As soon as you have a clock ticking, it adds an element of stress to it. Part of the charm of games like Wordle is that it’s all about delight. Casual is good. Get rid of the threat.

If you really want something to formulate a score, count the number of guesses.

I think you could keep the timed aspect, but the current format of the game makes it too prominent for those of us who are primarily interested in reducing the guesses. The first thing I'd do is get rid of the sad faces for missed stars at the end. As silly as it sounds, it feels like being penalized for approaching the game more methodically.

If you just show the number of stars the player got at the end without emphasizing what they missed, those who are playing for speed are rewarded with more stars, those who are playing for low guesses are rewarded for a low number.

A "Competitive" mode and a "Zen" mode.

I agree... I think there are actually a couple of niggles that work together:

- there's a timer

- solutions are not always unique

Often in Wordle, you'll have three or four green letters, which leaves several possible answers, and you just have to guess which one is correct. Some days you'll be lucky, some days you won't! But it feels OK because you're not working against a clock; so you have time to mull over the possibilities and decide which one feels better.

In Three Magic words, because you're racing against the clock, once you see a solution you immediately want to put it in. But sometimes it gets rejected! For example, on Tuesday's puzzle:

Gur pbeerpg fbyhgvba jnf CRRYF naq OHYXL, ohg V gevrq CRRXF naq OHYYL juvpu V guvax jbhyq nyfb unir orra inyvq.

Somehow that feels more unfair than the Wordle case. I wonder if it might be better just to accept any valid solution that uses known common words?

There are a few reasons I didn't pursue that — one of them that comes to mind because of having to deal with repeats - for example, let's say in round 1 you have TRIAL and in round 2 you have TRAIL. You see TR---, guess TRAIL in round one and the game marks it correct. In round 2, you see TR--- and guess TRAIL again.

I think that solution lock you experience - it's a little uncomfortable, but once you learn to wriggle your way out of it, you get that "aha" feeling I'm going for.

I actually think it would be much more fun if it could accept multiple solutions. You could even have 5 words and a letter bank. That part of it, quickly finding ways to use the letters, is fun. The speed bonus would make a lot more sense then.

> I think that solution lock you experience - it's a little uncomfortable, but once you learn to wriggle your way out of it, you get that "aha" feeling I'm going for.

This is the part that gives me the "ugh" experience.

Completely agree. You could simply remove the timer and it would instantly be a better game. People can compare scores by number of guesses

The timer also really doesn't mesh well with the slow "letters falling down" animation between rounds. The UI is sending very mixed signals with "how quickly can you do this?" and "hold on, gotta wait here for a bit" at the same time.

I like the time pressure aspect, but I agree the animations should be snappier. Different TOKES for different FOLKS, I GUESS.

I’d also enjoy some form of global leaderboard of some sort (maybe a scatterplot comparing time and accuracy?), so I can assess how inferior/superior I am to others.

Yeah, if you want the dropping animation and you can't start typing before then, then don't start the timer before the animation finishes.

There is also the age-old argument about British-English vs American English e.g. Armor is not spelled that way in British English so it takes a lot more effort to work these out.

Pretty slick though.

Well executed unique approach, great job! I’ve worked in games my whole life, and that’s hard to do!

Like others, I personally don’t like the time pressure and have really enjoyed the async one a day whenever format of wordle. It largely depends on your target audience and objectives for whether it’s right for this game. Separate zen/challenge modes would help players self select, but also muddies the onboarding. Great job though, fun game!

Thanks! Not sure what to do with it, to be honest.

I had trouble finding the game satisfying without some goal beyond just solving it. However, speed is not required unless you care — you can win without collecting the stars. Perhaps it would be enough to have a well-worded checkbox on the play page ("Chill mode," "don't pressure me", "I'll take my time", something).

Currently the game would seem to be balanced towards quickly "brute-forcing" the words one by one. E.g. I've now finished two Wednesdays under four minutes and average four stars while the game says "5½ minutes (with practice)", and English is a second language to me:

> Three Magic Words Wednesday/Week 5: ***** in 03:43/21 guesses

I had only two letters left, K and L. Words: BUL_Y and PEE_S. Each letter works fine in either spot, but only one way was correct. That kind of annoyed me because I guessed wrong the first time.

I don’t think there can be any easy way around issues like that in games like these. At least this game doesn’t penalize you for it

never generate a puzzle with two solutions, or accept both solutions.

in this case that puzzle had more solutions because it rejected keeps and bully as well

> never generate a puzzle with two solutions, or accept both solutions.

I think there's a very popular game making the rounds at the moment that flies in the face of this "wisdom"

This is the was way.

Well I did lose some time trying to figure out why two seemingly valid words didn’t work, only after a bit did I realize swapping the letters also worked and was the “correct” solution.

Had a similar issue, tried to use VIXEN and DIMES, but VINES and MIXED was the "correct" answer.

Nice execution, a variation of Wordle but different enough so as to not be taken as a clone :-) Quick feedback, why does the round timer inside the yellow star starts decreasing while the letters are still falling/appearing? Shouldn't it start the countdown once all letters and the palying field is ready?

Thanks! Really, that star shouldn't appear so quickly. It currently appears as soon as the new round comes into existence. You get about 40 seconds to get the star from the end of the last round, so I could certainly cheat and have the countdown circle start at around 38 seconds so it wouldn't seem unfair.

I enjoyed this but I think it could use some refinement.

I feel like you should either remove the timer, or accept any correct three words. Being punished for coming up with three words that fit, but aren't the three words you expected, is kind of frustrating.

To be honest I find the fact that it evaluates one word at a time to be pretty jarring. I want to be able to try letters in spots without the game yelling at me that they're wrong before I've committed to them. Instead I basically need to replicate the game board down below in the negative space.

It seems that you can click on a box and add a letter, or click a letter to remove it. It's only once you complete a word that it registers a guess.

You can drag letters to any position you'd like. The red dot just seems to be a helping hand for when you want to tap a letter to commit it to a spot.

It's not the red dot I'm talking about, it's the fact that the game counts it as a wrong guess as soon as you fill in a word. I want to play around with the letters to make all three words before committing to a guess. But the game rejects every wrong thing you put in.

Gotcha. Your idea would be nice. It's not ideal, but in the meantime you can arrange the letters by dragging them around at the bottom.

Very well done. I almost love it, but the timed nature bothers me, as does the existence of multiple wrong board solves. With this game, I don't want to type in guesses without solving the whole board first, I like the logic puzzle, but if I solve the whole board first and it's wrong, that's too big a chunk of work to throw out for maybe one green or yellow square.

I could be in the wrong here, haven't played it much yet! Congrats on showing it off, very cool.

I liked the game and have never played Wordle, so can't really compare. However, I was stuck on one specific set of words for a long time due to spelling issues. The word I couldn't grok was "armor", whereas my brain would by default only recognise "armour". It'd be a nice small enhancement to state clearly what dictionary was being used for the spellings.

Yes, that should be explicitly stated. Thank you!

Very nice! It's a fun game, and looks really nicely implemented.

Congratulations especially on finding the energy to push through and finish this. It must have been a bit disheartening to see Wordle's massive success, and it could have been an easy excuse not to bother finishing your own game (or at least to radically re-think and simplify it into yet another me-too Wordle clone).

Thanks! I was mostly worried that Wordle's initial press tended to give the impression that Wardle had invented the game (and I grumbled about that here and elsewhere) — so I feared I would be accused of copying his work.

I like it! But my one criticism is that it wastes too much time on animation, especially when transitioning from one round to the next. I'm anxious to get started, but have to wait at least 5 seconds for the current puzzle to dissolve, and then all the tiles for the next round to move into place one by one.

Mine loads, but the keyboard never appears to guess letters. I have no idea if there is a bug or if I am doing it wrong.

Mobile chrome on Google pixel 3.

Same here

Same here. No keyboard in portrait mode. When I change to landscape mode, I can see the first row of letters to guess, but that's it.

If it helps, I'm using Chrome on OnePlus Nord.

I think I've fixed this (hopefully without breaking something else). Give it another look if you can and let me know.

Bug: if you click the next letter while the 'victory' animation for the previous letter is still playing, it replaces the previous correct letter with the new one you clicked, instead of putting the second letter in the next empty space

Too much animation overall

I think I follow, thank you. Perhaps a reduced animation option (or respecting prefers-reduced-motion setting) would help.

While we're on the topic, I found the animations in between puzzles too distracting, particularly given there's a timer. If you're timing me, the puzzle better let me play as fast I can!

I think, once you've put a letter in place, clicking another letter should either be blocked until animations are finished or should go ahead and fill the next available place

Nice game and execution!

Can't thank you enough for letting me arrange the letters before I use them for a solution. No idea how others feel here, but for that's the difference between "this is fun" and "this is so incredibly hard I will stop at the first puzzle". One can argue that this is a different kind of difficulty level, keeping your 'used' letters in your head.

One small nitpick: Sometimes I was doubleclicking a (correct) letter and it was moving towards the red dot, but just before it locked in, it came back and I had to drag it there. I was playing this on a very slow machine though.

I like this a lot. I sort of agree with other posters about the animations, though it looks really good so perhaps some middle ground is possible here. Timer is stressful, but that's fine IMHO - it's a different vibe to Wordle (which let's be honest is waaay too easy) and allows you to compete on a more granular level.

I don't so much mind the multiple solutions - if you get the 'wrong' one, that's a new datapoint and you need to guess again, hangman style - but I don't like that it counts as a wrong guess in your stats.

But yeah, I'll play this again for sure.

Echoing some thoughts here:

- The animations definitely detract for me. It feels like it's about to start showing pop up ads or videos that I have to watch for 30 seconds before continuing

- I just ignored the timer. Making it optional is a great idea

- I don't have any problem with multiple possible solutions. That's just part of the game.

- Would I play again? TBH, probably not. The "fill in the blanks" dynamic just doesn't feel very challenging. Maybe hard mode would be better, but as I understand it I have to wait for later in the week for that, and then presumably on Monday it will cycle back to easy?

You can scroll down on the main play page to play the previous challenges. You might like Thursday and Friday more.

Oh, yes - the first time I looked at it was on my phone and I didn't even notice that you could scroll down. I think because the links for Help, Contact, Privacy appear at the bottom of the viewport and those are normally in the footer of the page I just assumed there was nothing below.

I would play the weekend level again. Dunno if I will be remembering to come back once a week, though.

This is cool, but there's a bug when there's multiple possible correct solutions https://i.imgur.com/S56AWWj.png

Not a bug! There are three specific words it’s looking for. I will find a way to make that more explicit.

Do you think there'd be a way to generate the puzzles that make a case like this is impossible? Like with this puzzle it's a 50/50 gamble whether you get it all in one guess or not

You cannot start the game using keyboard. Its nice that game itself supports it, just make that <div class="[...] play-pane […]"> a <button>, pretty please.

Sadly, the same applies even to THE wordle [0]. And frankly even majority of otherwise "keyboard-only" or "keyboard oriented" games out there.

(It's beyond my comprehension why is that so.)

[0] https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

I will investigate. Sorry about that, and thanks for the input.

That change should be deployed before tomorrow morning. I'll also make it so you can hit Escape to pause the game.

I honestly thought you had copied wordle. Well done on powering through. Finishing a project like this is an accomplishment in itself and the fact it is polished adds to it.

Playing on latest Firefox, Windows 10. Was doing the easiest one, and at 1:14 in the fifth round after I typed in the letters for the third row, it just froze up. Didn't say I won or ran out of time. Not sure if that's how it ends or it bugged out.

I personally prefer games without time pressure, and I kept trying to type the whole word, not just the missing letters. But it's still a neat idea and an overall great execution.

Definitely doesn't end like that -- when I finished, it gave sort of a summary screen with the performance for each round (kind of similar-ish to Wordle's summary screen). So sounds like it bugged out for you.

Nice game. I liked the feel of moving the tiles. There is a slight problem when I first enter a new puzzle. The movable tiles are below the screen! [0] (On Android, standard Chrome browser). It fixes itself if I rotate to landscape and then back to portrait.

So far I like the word list you've used. But I've only tried the easier days :p.

[0]: https://ibb.co/7NvPTnM

Thank you!

...and in Firefox on the same Android device everything works fine.

Works absolutely flawlessly on mobile for me (Android Firefox).

The animations are very satisfying and the game is very fun.

Fantastic work!

edit: This is on OxygenOS 11.1.2.2 and FireFox 96.3.1

on my phone (Samsung Galaxy Note10+, Chrome) ... the layout is broken ... the "keyboard" / available tiles at the bottom are off screen and invisible / inaccessible

I really don't like that it's timed.

Looks like the game can get itself into invalid states: https://imgur.com/a/3Wktj10. Don't want to spoil this board, but there are incorrect letters accepted as green here.

* edit: just saw that oceliker ran into the same issue.

Yeah I am trying to figure this out. I have not been able to reproduce it. It should not be possible; I think the UI state is getting out of sync with the true puzzle state. It looks like you tried VIALS - do you know if you interacting pretty quickly? Using the keyboard or not? Another person reported weirdness with tiles that were supposed to be getting locked in place instead being replaceable. I wonder if the final row was merrily animating its lock into place sequence, then you typed VIALS, and it permitted those to moved, falsely locking them into place in the other word?

I was using the mouse to drag around letters, not the keyboard. It was my first time playing and I was still wrapping my head around basic game concepts, so it's unlikely that I was interacting quickly.

This game is simultaneously more stressful, less challenging, and less fun than wordle. I especially hate the timer

Slightly off-topic: when Flappy Bird was cool, games popped up everywhere that were derivatives of Flappy Bird. When 2048 took the scene, a flurry of 2048-like games appeared. Flappy 2048 games also exist.

Does a Flappy Wordle, 2048 Wordle or Flappy 2048 Wordle exist?

Curious, why was this implemented as a native app? From what I see, this could have been implemented as a webapp as well. This would have enabled a greater reach, and the possibility to embed this inside different websites.

I've never felt more disconnected from pop culture than now. The quantity of posts that just ASSUMED people knew what the hell Wordle was helped me realize that I do, indeed, live under a rock.

Do you not read HN that much? It's a worldwide phenomenon. Wordle-related content has been on HN practically everyday since mid January.

I had seen it on the front page several times, but every single time I clicked on it, there was no context. Where did it come from? Did it first go viral on Facebook or something? I think my ignorance is likely due to not being on social media anymore. I quit all of it to improve my mental health.

"I've never heard of wordle before" is becoming the most tiresome humblebrag of 2022

Humble brag? Why do people online always just assume the worst about a comment?

Why is it a GOOD thing I've never heard of it? I was actually kind of embarrassed about it, and simply expressed my feeling of being detached in a way that I typically don't feel.

Is this a bug or am I missing something here? Looks like I'm out of vowels...

https://imgur.com/a/D57IgjE

I have a possible solution but I can't figure out how to post it here without spoiling it immediately. If you tell me it's OK, or if somebody tells me how to post text with a black background (so you have to select the text to see it), I'll post it.

Paste it to, I don't know, https://dpaste.org

Using dpaste is a great idea! But I just realized that I was reading the clues wrong -- I thought the gray tiles were the user's attempts, not clues that the game gave you as already correct. It does indeed look like a bug or it's using a very obscure word. Sorry!

Seems like a bug to me. The first word of the last puzzle starts with the C, not the V.

Yeah that's a bug - should be impossible. Thank you for posting, kinda important that that doesn't happen. I will check it out.

Wish I could tell you exactly what I was doing at the time, but I don't remember :( I only remember I was entering guesses as fast as possible even while the slow return animations were going on, maybe it has something to do with that.

Cool, fun, inventive, challenging. Might enjoy it even more than Wordle.

It took a second for it to load on my mac -- I thought maybe it was busted. Maybe page load speed is something to look into.

I've been enjoying this one too -- https://nytimes-spellingbee.com/

Waiting for animations is killing my speed run drive.

On Samsung A52s in Chrome I couldn't see the letters to insert in portrait mode, and I couldn't zoom out to see them.

Great animations and game concept. Would be nice to make it multiplayer and have people work on the same puzzle and race.

Nice design. I like the stars as an extra feeling of success and pressure beyond just getting the word right.

I finished about 20 seconds slower than I would have if the animation hadn't lagged as much.

I think that's part of the game:

> Repeated bad guesses incur a time penalty.

I made guesses and paid for them in the last round. But my 2nd and 3rd rounds were just

slowly

animated

Lots of criticism and 'suggestions' here... I think this game is great!

i appreciate the challenge this offers compared to wordle.

NYT's spelling bee has a feature that i think you should consider implementing: a button and/or key press (e.g. space) that shuffles the remaining, unused letters.

I like that, thanks!

It is very fun, I spent my commute playing this game today. Great job!

Fun game and snappy, delightful animation! Thanks for sharing this.

The Play button doesn't work for me under Safari 15.2 on OS X.

It's too easy.

Is Wordle too easy? Right now, that’s a benchmark for these kinds of games.

A few of the Wordle's I had to think for several minutes, but this game is pretty instant.

I hope we can play this game with our friends

Great execution, love the juicy animations!

This was a lot of fun. Really great work!

It uses massive amounts of CPU even when idle.

I realize this is common in games, but don't let anyone tell you any different: this is shit code.

Doesn't work on android

Urk - what browser/version please?

On Chrome on Android (whatever is latest on the Play store) in portrait mode, the bottom letters are off the bottom of the screen. If I rotate everything is small but I can see it.

Thank you, that's super helpful.

It worked on my Android device when I rotated the screen to landscape mode, though not with optimal UI anymore. The bottom character row is invisible in portrait mode on my device. Great fun though!

Thanks - I did struggle with getting the game to size properly under different conditions. I sorely lack deep knowledge of the matrix of Android browsers/OS version quirks.

In brave browser on Android I can't see any blue tiles to drag up / keyboard doesn't open. Not sure what the functionality is meant to be.

Looks good though

OK I think I've fixed this. Please take another look if you can.

It works. And it is kind of fun!

why is it 3 MB?

The heavier bits: about 800k of that is the .webp animations showing how to play. The actual game has a bunch of image resources — including font sprites for the timer and the tiles — that are probably a few hundred k as well. The regular site stuff is sveltekit.

The game script is around 300k. I used Phaser [0] — I originally wrote the game in Swift for iOS and utilized one of that platform’s gaming frameworks(SpriteKit). I rewrote it in TypeScript for the web and wanted a similar framework to ease the porting.

[0] https://phaser.io

Reply on news.ycombinator.com